


Everything

by awed_frog



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Brotherly Love, Coda, Coming Out, Episode: s11e19 The Chitters, Feels, Homophobia, I Will Go Down With This Ship, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 02:09:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6685009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awed_frog/pseuds/awed_frog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s not fair, what you and Jesse had to go through,” Sam says, his fingers tightening, only just, around the dark glass of his own bottle.</p><p>For a split second, Dean wants to push back against it, because that’s what he does, that’s what he’s always done (it’s like muscle memory by now: he laughs it off or beats it out of people in the same way he can bring his arm up and deflect a blade mid-blow), and the words are right there, hard as metal against his teeth - <em>I don’t know what you're talking about, It’s not like that, Shut the fuck up</em> - but then he just shakes his head, gives up.</p><p>He’s too tired, even for that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything

**Author's Note:**

> God, right now I’m loving this show so damn _much_ my heart is splitting open. As I was watching this last episode, I kept thinking something would go wrong - when Cesar went off alone I actually yelled at the screen in rage and warning, because, surely, that was _it_ \- he was going to fucking _die_ \- and instead - instead -
> 
> Because this _happens_. This is something people _do_ , even if the Winchesters have forgotten all about it. People can (and do) step closer to each other, and they can (and do) love each other, and then, one day, they may very well decide to forget about the monsters and go and breed horses instead. 
> 
> The world can sometimes seem beautiful, because it sometimes is.
> 
> [Favourite soundtrack: Daan vaan Beijreren, _Words_ ]

It’s only because Sam has been drinking that the thing comes out at all.

Not that Sam is _drunk_ , exactly, or even tipsy, but these days they’re both so keyed up even a few beers are enough to take them to the very edge - and Dean has nothing against it, in a way, because he’s damn done and tired to pretend - he’s been pretending to be strong for Sam for such a fucking long time, and he never thought he’d have to -

(Looking at Sammy’s back, at his brother’s faded brown jacket disappear into the landscape as Sam walked on and on - Dean had known, rationally, that Sam was just trying to get to the bus stop, but his shoulders were still so tense - Dean wouldn’t have been surprised if the fucking kid had decided to walk all the way to California just on principle.

And yeah, it'd _hurt_ , it'd hurt like a son of a bitch to see Sammy walk away from them - from _him_ \- but at the same time, Dean had felt a momentous sense of relief. He was finished. His job was done. Sammy was getting out, and he was alive, and he was going to become a lawyer and have a house of his own instead of the backseat of a car. Sammy was leaving it all behind, the monsters and Dad and even Dean himself, whose love for his brother cut way too deep not to hurt and burn. Yes, Sammy was gone, and Dean could - he couldn’t get out, of course, and he couldn’t be himself either, not fully, but he could - he could stop being in charge. And that had been a lot. That had been _enough_.)

\- and now finally he doesn’t _have_ to, not really, because his damn brother is a foot taller than he is and also much stronger and braver and he doesn’t need Dean, not anymore, not like this (he doesn’t need Dean to heat up garbage food for him, and he doesn’t need Dean to remind him to be normal - to do his homework and smile and never talk about Dad’s job - and he doesn’t need Dean to hold him and stroke his hair until he falls asleep when he can’t be normal, when he remembers Mom is dead because of him and even his dreams become blood and bitter ash). 

So, yeah, it’s not like Dean feels he has to pretend anymore, not around Sam, but still, the blunt statement has him choke on his beer.

“It’s not fair, what you and Jesse had to go through,” Sam says, his fingers tightening, only just, around the dark glass of his own bottle.

For a split second, Dean wants to push back against it, because that’s what he does, that’s what he’s always done (it’s like muscle memory by now: he laughs it off or beats it out of people in the same way he can bring his arm up and deflect a blade mid-blow), and the words are right there, hard as metal against his teeth - _I don’t know what you're talking about, It’s not like that, Shut the fuck up_ \- but then he just shakes his head, gives up.

He’s too tired, even for that.

“Well, life’s not fair,” he says instead, something that was supposed to be a smile on his face. “That’s not news.”

He feels Sam glancing at him, and he knows without looking Sam is trying to decide if he actually wants to talk about this. He remembers Sam watching Jesse and Cesar as they stood together by the pire, close enough to touch; remembers the weight of his brother’s gaze shifting to him instead, and it had been a weight, it always _was_ a weight, because that’s the kind of person Sam is: someone with heavy feelings and heavy thoughts and so many damn questions Dean had thought he’d die or kill him when they were kids, just to have some peace - _Why is the sky blue_ and _Why don’t we have a house_ and _Where is Dad, really_ \- and yet they’re still alive, both of them, and this weight doesn’t matter at all, not anymore, because this is his brother, and nothing will ever change that. Dean can take it. So he says nothing and remains there, his eyes on the glittering bottles behind the bar, and he lets that weight wash all over him instead of standing up and walking away, because, to his credit, this is a question Sam has taken a long time to ask, and if he wants an answer, then he will get one.

This is all there is to it, and maybe it’s insane (there’s something inside him, something that has been getting smaller and smaller as the years went by, something which is pushing and buzzing at him and telling him there’s no coming back from it), but Dean has slept fifteen hours over the past week and is way too tired to fight back.

“I should have done more. I should have been there for you,” Sam finally says, and there’s such an edge to his voice - Dean turns around, surprised.

“You did. You were,” he says, but Sam shakes his head.

“I knew about New York. And I did nothing.”

New York. Yeah, Dean remembers that well enough. How the walls had moved a bit around him, how they’d almost _vibrated_ with light and music. He remembers the boy with blue hair pulling at his waist, hooking his fingers in Dean’s belt loops and steadying him as Dean looked around unsteadily and laughed at the eerie beauty of it.

 _Song and color, right?_ the boy had murmured against Dean’s neck, and Dean had lowered his head - had seen and felt the ceiling, the wall, the back of the couch, the boy’s soft curls, indigo and teal, the boy’s soft eyes, green and grey - had settled himself more firmly on the boy’s lap.

 _Song and color and fucking butterflies_ , he’d said, for some reason, pressing the palm of his hand on the boy’s cheek, aroused and confused by the tickling of stubble against his skin, and next - 

“Dude, you were thirteen.”

Again, Sam shakes his head, and now his fingers tighten so much around the bottle his knuckles turn white.

“I was old enough to hunt. I should have been old enough to - to -”

And Dean knows Sam’s memory of that night is rather different. Sam’s memory is looking at Dean from the backseat of the Impala - Dean had been high, but somehow he’s sure of this - that he’d seen Sam’s pale, thin face behind the glass, his palm pressed up against the closed window. Sam’s memory is Dad beating the shit out of Dean, sobering him up with loud words and angry blows. 

(And, perhaps, Sam’s memory of it is a closed circle where all the parts click together, because, sure, all Dad had said? _Don’t let me catch you doing that, ever again_ \- but Sam had still slithered into the bathroom, hours later - he’d still seen Dean bowed over the sink, his naked back slowly blooming with bruises. He’d still seen the shape of hands on Dean’s upper arm, as delicate as blue petals, and yet unmistakable: too small to be John’s, too big to be a woman’s. He’d still seen the hickeys on Dean’s neck.

And yet, Sam had said nothing. He’d closed the door behind him, had sat down on the toilet and chattered on about _Jane Eyre_ for half an hour, because his last English lit teacher had given him a copy and _Oh my God, Sammy, that’s a girls book_ and _Even if it were, there’s nothing wrong with reading girls books. There’s nothing wrong with any of it_.)

Dean looks at Sam - the real one, a gigantic man who needs a shave and at least one other beer, and not that skinny kid who couldn’t bring himself to look as his brother tried to do something about his broken lip - and he _sees_ it. There’s the exact same expression on his face, because Sam had meant it back then - _There’s nothing wrong with any of it_ \- and he means it now. Which is why what he’s saying makes no sense. No sense at all.

“It's okay,” Dean says, very firmly. “And it doesn’t matter, anyway. Bygones and all that.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, but he doesn’t sound convinced.

It’s a Tuesday night, and the bar is way too quiet around them. A group of kids is playing pool, and an old guy is sitting by himself nursing a whiskey, but that’s all. Just a bar in the middle of nowhere; a place where it’s both too early and too late for things to be interesting.

“Just tell me,” Sam says, when it’s been so long Dean’s mind is in that other place already - a dark room of secret jagged edges and hard walls, because he can’t solve it, he can’t, he’s too stupid and too weak and Cas will die because of that, and how is he supposed - and it’s everything, really, it’s the lack of sleep, and Jesse’s careful, aggressive posture, and also the way he’d seemed to relax against Cesar in the end, because Dean knows what’s that like - how it is to be with that one person you can be yourself with, and not worry about anything, not about your scars and not about your mistakes and not even about your pitiful shortcomings - he knows, and yet he’s _lost_ it. Dean’s _lost_ him, and he’s not getting him back. So when Sam finishes his sentence with slow, careful words, Dean doesn’t even realize, at first, what Sam is talking about.

“What?” he asks, and he makes some kind of effort, to breathe, to be a person again, to function despite that empty thing inside his chest.

“It’s just - I know it’s none of my business, but I need to know - I hope you were happy, Dean. Sometimes. That you didn’t do - that you wanted to do what you did. That you weren’t just doing it for Dad’s sake, or mine.”

The thing doesn’t make any sense. Again, Dean’s mind falls back inside that dark room for a second, before Dean manages to get himself back out again, turn his brother’s broken sentences over in his mind, figure out what they mean. And it’s fucking hard, all of it. Thinking, understanding. Staying alive, even.

When he cottons up, he actually smiles for a second, because, yeah, so he’s a good actor when he needs to be, but nobody’s so damn _good_.

“Stop fretting, Sammy,” he says, passing the back of his hand on his eyes, trying to wake the fuck up. “I’m okay with the ladies. I’m okay with everything. I’m just that easy, I guess.”

It was supposed to be a joke, but, yeah, that didn’t work all that well. There’s too much truth to it for the thing to come out right - all those hugs Dean has missed out on, all those times he would have needed someone to hold him and tell him everything’s always darker before the dawn and whatever else - hell, by the time he’d figured out that could still be _had_ , sort of, even if only for ten minutes or a few hours, that it worked almost as well to silence those snide voices inside him -

(Dean remembers that as well, because he can’t fucking forget _anything_ , no matter how hard he tries, and no matter how much it hurts. He remembers how soft Robin’s hair had been, and the fluttering feeling of her smile against his neck, and the soft weight of her breasts against his chest. How that had been, if only for a moment, enough.)

\- that had been it. Dean had been determined to hold on to that feeling, to drown himself in it, again and again and again, and he knows, he’s always known, that it’s wrong and weak of him; knows it will always leave a bitter aftertaste all the way down to his stomach. He’s been called a bastard more times than he could count, and that’s just the women, because the men - Dean’s heard all those other names as well. Not directed at him, or rarely, but that’s just because he knows how to hide, which doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve them. At some point, though, he simply stopped listening. Hell, he actually _stopped_ , period. 

(That woman on her own on Valentine’s Day: blue eyes and dark hair and yet all wrong. Dean had smiled and paid for her drink and walked away.)

Sam makes some kind of movement, as if he wants to touch Dean, but then his hand stills on the dark wood of the bar.

“Dude, we shared a room for thirty years. One thing you’re _not_ is easy to live with,” he says, almost managing to scoff. “You’re a pain in the ass, man. You wake me up if I snore and you bitch at me if I don’t fold my clothes and you are a _control_ freak and I’ve seen you rearrange whole stacks of papers in police files because they weren’t in the order you wanted them in.”

“Shut up, I’m an absolute joy to be around,” Dean says, and that emptiness inside his chest shrinks a little, because that’s not what he’d meant, and Sam knows it, of course he does, and yet he’s taken the thing and made it pink and fluffy, like he almost always does, because he’s just _that_ girly and he knows Dean well enough to recognize this is not something they’ll actually talk about - not tonight, and not, maybe, ever - and yet something still needed to be said. “You’re just a slob.”

“Okay, that is so _not_ true, I’m just - your bed has _hospital_ corners!” Sam insists, and this time the scoff comes quite naturally, and the exasperated, resentful expression is so familiar on his face Dean’s smile widens. 

“Which is the done thing.”

“Is not.”

“Is too.”

“I think it’s time to call Crowley,” Sam says, abruptly, and, yeah, so that’s one evening finished.

“Thought you didn’t like him,” Dean answers, a bit too lightly, turning away and finishing his beer.

“I don’t.”

 _But you do_ , is the unspoken thing there, and they both know it.

“He’s hiding,” Dean says, to cover up the moment. “I doubt he’ll come out.”

“He must know how to track Amara. Him, or Rowena.”

Out of habit, Dean checks out the exits, then he stands up, leaves a few bills on the counter.

“We track her down, we both die.”

Sam stands up as well, nods at the bartender, follows Dean to the door.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he says, his words as light as the night air now whispering at them both; as delicate and dangerous as barely there snow and barely there rain - the kind of thing that gets you shouting and singing and staring up in wonder.

“Yeah,” it’s all Dean can answer, because he knows perfectly well what Sam means - that it doesn’t even matter why Cas did what he did, or what, exactly, he was trying to do - the thing is, Dean can’t live without him and Sam gets it.

_You're my big brother, there's nothing I wouldn't do for you._

And that’s why Dean stops by the back of the Impala, and pops the trunk open, and scratches off a bit of the white paint twirling and twisting into a demonic sigil.

“About bloody time,” Crowley says, from behind him; and then, spotting Sam’s tall figure waiting in the darkness, he adds, hurriedly, “I call shotgun.”

“Keep dreaming,” says Dean, and he has the strangest impulse for a second - he slams the trunk shut, and as he walks back to the car door, he looks at Crowley (who’s as immaculate and entitled as ever in his ridiculous black suit) and almost wants to smile at him. 

Pushing back against the stupid instinct, he rolls his eyes instead, glances at Sam in exasperation.

“Come on, get in, both of you. And _no_ fighting.”

“I love it when you get all bossy.”

“Shut up, Crowley.”

“See, _bossy_ doesn’t work on you, Moose. You’re just too much of a prude to be convincing.”

“What did I just say?” Dean grumbles; and when he turns the key in the ignition, _Metallica_ blasts out of the radio.

He chooses to take that as a sign, because, why not. Sam knows now, and the world hasn’t ended. And Cas -

 _You hang in there, okay?_ he thinks, surreptitiously looking out of the window at the dark, starless sky. _I’m coming for you. Just hold on._

He doesn’t know if Cas can hear him, if he should end this half prayer in any kind of way - the words are there, pushing against the jagged edges of that empty space inside his chest, but before Dean can decide how to finally get them out, Sam and Crowley are bickering again, so he just sighs and turns up the music.

 _No more can they keep us in_ , Hetfield sings, as the lights of the rundown bar slowly disappear behind them. _Listen, damn it, we will win._

**Author's Note:**

>  _Knock, and He'll open the door_  
>  _Vanish, and He'll make you shine like the sun_  
>  _Fall, and He'll raise you to the heavens_  
>  _Become nothing, and He'll turn you into everything._  
>  ― Rumi


End file.
